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Photograph: Courtesy Joan MarcusHamilton

The best Broadway shows you need to see

Our critics list the best Broadway shows. NYC is the place to catch these top-notch plays, musicals and revivals.

Adam Feldman
Written by
Adam Feldman
&
Time Out editors
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The best Broadway shows attract millions of people to enjoy the pinnacle of live entertainment in New York City. Every season brings a fresh crop of Broadway musicals, plays and revivals, some of which go on to glory at the Tony Awards. Some are for only limited runs, but others stick around for years. Along with star-driven dramas and family-oriented blockbusters, you can still find the kind of artistically ambitious offerings that are more common to the smaller venues of Off Broadway. Here are our theater critics' top choices among the shows that are currently playing on the Great White Way. 

RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z Listings of All Broadway Shows in NYC

Best Broadway shows in NYC

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

If theater is your religion, and the Broadway musical your particular sect, it’s time to rejoice. This gleefully obscene and subversive satire is one of the funniest shows to grace the Great White Way since The Producers and Urinetown. Writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park, along with composer Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), find the perfect blend of sweet and nasty for this tale of mismatched Mormon proselytizers in Uganda.—David Cote

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

Composer-lyricist-star Lin-Manuel Miranda forges a groundbreaking bridge between hip-hop and musical storytelling with this sublime collision of radio-ready beats and an inspiring, immigrant slant on Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. A brilliant, diverse cast takes back American history and makes it new.—David Cote 

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Drama
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

The world of Harry Potter has arrived on Broadway, Hogwarts and all, and it is a triumph of theatrical magic. Set two decades after the final chapters of J.K. Rowling’s world-shaking kid-lit heptalogy, Jack Thorne's epic (richly elaborated by director John Tiffany) combines grand storytelling with stagecraft on a scale heretofore unimagined. It leaves its audience awestruck, spellbound and deeply satisfied.—Adam Feldman

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

Sixteen is not sweet for the heroine of this bruisingly joyful new musical by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori: Played by the wonderful Victoria Clark, she has a disease that makes her age at a superfast rate. But two agents of disruption shake up her perspective: her aunt Debra (the unstoppable Bonnie Milligan), a hilarious gale force of chaos, and Seth (a winsome Justin Cooley), an anagram-loving classmate. Clever, touching and idiosyncratic, Kimberly Akimbo was the best new musical of 2021, and it works even better on Broadway.—Adam Feldman

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  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Midtown West
  • Recommended

It's finally Merrily’s time. Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez do exceptional work as three old friends whose paths diverge in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's rueful and tuneful cult-fave 1981 musical flop, whose brilliant score is melded to a tricky back-to-front narrative about lost ideals. The very fine supporting cast of director Maria Friedman’s first-class revival  includes Reg Rogers, Katie Rose Clarke and Krystal Joy Brown.—Adam Feldman

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Midtown West
  • Recommended

Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas's artful musical treatment of alcoholism raises a toast that ends in shattered glass. Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara play a 1950s couple. He teaches her to drink, and at first the bottle’s genie grants their wishes: happiness, love, professional success. But beware the gifts of spirits. Guettel’s sophisticated score has the feel of a chamber opera; it is intimate and interior in scope, at times claustrophobic, and it couldn’t ask for better interpreters than the superb O’Hara and James, two of Broadway’s finest singing actors. If the show isn’t exactly galvanizing, it is effectively sober. After seeing it you might need a drink, or might never want one again.—Adam Feldman

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 3 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

Go to hell—and by hell we mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. But the newness of Mitchell’s score and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging bring this old story to quivering life.—Adam Feldman

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

Director-designer Julie Taymor surrounds the Disney movie’s mythic plot and Elton John–Tim Rice score with African rhythm and music. Through elegant puppetry, Taymor populates the stage with a menagerie of African beasts; her staging has expanded a simple cub into the pride of Broadway.—Adam Feldman

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Hell's KitchenOpen run
  • Recommended

Casey Cott and Courtney Reed play lovers caught in a bad romance in this gorgeous, gaudy, spectacularly overstuffed  adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie. Directed with opulent showmanship by Alex Timbers and drawing music from more than 75 pop hits, this jukebox megamix may be costume jewelry, but its shine is dazzling.—Adam Feldman

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

Who doesn’t enjoy a royal wedding? Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's zingy musical Six celebrates, in boisterous fashion, the union of English dynastic history and modern pop music. On a mock concert stage, the six wives of the 16th-century monarch Henry VIII air their grievances in song, and most of them have plenty to complain about. In this self-described “histo-remix,” members of the long-suffering sextet spin their pain into bops; the queens sing their heads off and the audience loses its mind.—Adam Feldman 

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Midtown West
  • Recommended

The 2005 musical Spamalot is a silly piece. Adapted by Eric Idle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail—with help from composer John Du Prez—this tongue-in-cheeky pageant tells the episodic story of King Arthur (James Monroe Iglehart) and his entourage in search of a vaunted relic. It's now a bit of a relic itself, as much of the Python material is reproduced word for word. (For better or worse, it’s what might be called a jokebox musical.) But the ensemble cast of Josh Rhodes's affectionate revival is highly capable, especially Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer as in a comedic and vocal tour de force as the Lady of the Lake.—Adam Feldman

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • Midtown West
  • Recommended

Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 killer-cannibal tale may well be the greatest of all Broadway musicals: an epic combination of horror and humor, cynicism and sentiment, Victorian melodrama and sophisticated wit. Its thrilling new revival, directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail, stars Josh Groban as the titular throat-slitting barber and Annaleigh Ashford, in a priceless comic turn, as his pie-making accomplice. Sondheim’s meaty Grand Guignol score sounds as grand here as it deserves to.—Adam Feldman

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  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Theater
  • Musicals
  • price 4 of 4
  • Midtown WestOpen run
  • Recommended

This musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz addresses surprisingly complex themes, such as standards of beauty, morality and, believe it or not, fighting fascism. Thanks to Winnie Holzman’s witty book and Stephen Schwartz’s pop-inflected score, Wicked soars.—David Cote

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